Walmart is doubling down on a futuristic way to train employees (WMT)

The headsets will be used to train about one million Walmart employees across the company's more than 4,700 USA stores.

Every Walmart associate, including those who work on the floor, will have access to the same training that managers and department mangers do at the Academies, according to the retailer.

Next month, every Walmart supercenter will receive four Oculus Go headsets, and every Neighborhood Market and discount store will receive two.

Walmart is shipping 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to stores for training purposes, the company announced on Thursday. Currently, there are more than 45 activity-based modules using software provided by StriVR, which is said to deliver "realistic, repeatable and scalable training content" to help associates better and faster learn and retain information. The modules are created to help associates learn information quicker and improve retention.

The giant retailer previously stated about its interest in VR, even experimented in its training academies a year ago. "In a pilot test this summer, 10 stores used VR for training on new Pickup Tower units in their stores".

It plans on putting more than 17,000 headsets in its USA stores by the end of 2018 in order to help train employees in areas like customer service, empathy, new technology and compliance. "This will be key as Walmart continues to roll out new tech to stores". VR is allowing associates to be trained before the towers are even installed - no teachers required. "It felt like you were actually loading the tower". Workers who used the tech described it as "beyond hands-on".

Instilling confidence is exactly what makes VR so effective as a training tool.

As the video above shows, Walmart is using VR to help associates experience a situation first hand rather than just reading about it or watching a video of someone else going through the motions. Associates have the ability to make mistakes in VR as they would in real life and learn from those errors without any consequences.

"Yes, we're focused on helping people do their jobs better every day".